Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Carl: Amid Toronto’s gnashing of teeth over the remarks of the similarly named hockey-comment goon as part of our new mayor’s invocation, I mean inauguration, this week, it seems useful to remember that there is a greater Don Cherry whose name will outlast that of the self-proclaimed “pitbull.” Here he is with James Blood Ulmer (guitar) and Rashied Ali (drums) – I’m not sure of the year.
Whatever you think of what WikiLeaks has done, the idea of rendering individual “cables” as comic strips is hard to resist:
And finally, The Pee-wee Herman Show‘s recent Broadway debut is a reminder that one of the most blessed trajectories for the avant-garde may be to end up as children’s entertainment. In that spirit, here is the Paper Rad art collective’s cartoon show, The Problem Solverz, which apparently is coming to the Comedy Network next year:
Margaux: This coming Saturday, Toronto’s Art Metropole (that specializes in artist multiples and reproductions) kicks off their GIFTS BY ARTISTS sale. I think Cecilia Berkovic may be a gift-wrapping performer on the Saturday but I’m not sure.
On the following Thursday (Dec 16th), Double Double Land hosts the MARK CONNERY FUNDRAZER SILENT AUCTION FUN. It’s a benefit auction for Mark Connery, who recently lost many of his things in an unfortunate house fire. There will be lots of good art up for good prices including work from Shary Boyle, Jay Isaac, Damien Hurst, The White House, me, Marc Bell, Olia Mishchenko, FASTWÜRMS and many others (including some Mark Connery smoke-damaged originals).
Chris: Tens of thousands of students converged on London to protest the British coalition government’s tripling of tutition fees this week. Dan Hancox recorded what they were listening to, from Vybz Kartel to Nicki Minaj. He also links to an account of the day by fellow music writer Alex Macpherson, which describes the psychological punishment meted out by that “kettling” tactic police forces love: “This was not containment of violent protesters…It seemed more to be motivated by traditional aims of kettling that are rarely stated: to demoralise protesters so much that they are dissuaded from taking part again, and to exhaust them physically so that they go home quietly (not that there was any need for the latter by this stage of the night). While queueing to leave Parliament Square, a woman next to me jokingly told a police officer that if they let us go, she would promise that this would be her last demonstration. The officer replied, ‘That’s the point.'”
It seems all too familiar in Toronto, where we now know that an endless kettle during last summer’s G20 summit was accompanied by random beatings. (For added surrealism, one harmless victim has the legal name Mr. Nobody.) And what does our new mayor think about the largest mass arrest in Canadian history? “Personally, if you didn’t want to be down there, then you shouldn’t have been down there.” “The police were too nice.”
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